Karcher's Robot Vacuum Cleaner Lives?

ElectronicsNews.Net has a new and
recent (Nov 14th 2002) article about the
rarely heard of Karcher's RoboVac 2000 vacuum cleaner. Maker Karcher makes various
cleaning appliances from vacuums to gas station car washes. What
appears
to be interesting about this vacuum is that it monitors the stream of
incoming dirt and will go back and forth over the same spot if it is
found to be especially dirty. Also, this vacuum is smart enough to go
back to a home base if it needs to recharge or if it needs to dump off
a load of dirt. I couldn't find a price for this vacuum, nor could I
find info on Karcher's home page and even links going back to Karcher's
site have mysteriously disappeared so it still may be vaporware. More
info can be found here, a better pic
along with other robot vacs can be found on
this page and on this page and here's an older article
about robot vacs on Robots.net.

At $2000 Euros it is too expensive, The ROOMBA came out recently at
$200 US, and it does pretty much everything it does, plus it vaccums
better too. $200 is a much better price, I think more people are likely
to give it a go at $200, but $2000 is a little much.

Traditionally the robot vaccums have all had problems vaccuming, either
they worked about as well as a FuzzBuster (which is worthless), or they
were really big and huge, only suitable in a office building hallway.
It looks like the Roomba may have finally overcome that suction problem.

Granted the Karcher unit does empty itself, linger over dirtier spots,
and it know to recharge itself too, but still $2000 is way too much.